I’m not entirely sure what I expected to happen after Jager snapped his fingers, but finding myself beside the Prius on the side of the freeway a short way from where we were originally wasn’t high on the list. I growled in the back of my throat.

My irritation was interrupted by a very timid squeak coming from the car. I turned and leaned down to peer through the window to see Alice, eyes wide and expression set in a comical display of pure terror, gently pushing Bogo into the driver’s seat and off her lap. Bogo obliged because he’s a good boy.

“Well, I got some good news,” I began.

“We know,” Tony said, rubbing his temple. “Albright just gave us the info dump.” Ida nodded, eyes squeezed shut in minor pain.

Alice’s phone began ringing.

“That’s probably him,” Ida muttered.

Alice took a couple of deep breaths to calm down before answering the phone and turning on the speaker.

“Hi, guys!” The chipper voice of Mr. Albright said a moment later. “So the boss made a big show of being put upon, but he’s mobilizing Elysium as we speak. I scooped up everything related to the case out of your respective heads and fed the data to our investigators—“

“That is a huge breach of privacy,” Ida said with some heat.

“Yup! I’ll make sure you get a gift card as an apology,” he said in such a way it was hard to tell if he was sarcastic or not. “As I was saying, they are taking your new data and cross-referencing it with their own investigations to see if we can come at this problem from multiple angles. The boss assigned me to you folks since you have a soulhound who seems to think he’s onto something big.”

I gave Bogo a glance, to which he gave me a quiet, confident “boof.”

“If you find something, the Boss’ll teleport a team in or arrive himself, and we take it from there!” Albright finished. “Easy-peasy!”

Yeah, no. There’s no way in hell I’m letting magi-cops take the lead on this.

I got back into the car, which involved having Bogo come out so I could get in the seat and then having him hop back onto my lap, almost destroying my balls again. I waited for him to settle before putting the car in gear and pulling back onto the highway.

I was trying to act cool on the outside, but I was a ball of anxiety. I inspected the passenger in my mind, surprised to find it unusually active. Usually any little twitch it made felt like my brain moving(which, if you haven’t experienced that particular sensation, thank your lucky stars), so having missed its activity until now was a little alarming. I multi-tasked driving while examining my passenger. After a few miles it became apparent that I hadn’t noticed any of the activity because whatever it was doing, it was doing to itself. It was focused inward. Huh.

“Colm?”

Now that that worry was somewhat assuaged, I focused on the main ball of my anxiety. In that, I wasn’t sure what category my passenger resided in, but the knowledge it had granted me nine years ago made me think it was Capital B, Big Deal. Just a brief impression of its knowledge about summoning, magic, and the universe gave me enough knowledge to summon new appendages and banish the Doorman. Either I was wrong about its capabilities, or it was able to hide from both Jager and Albright. The former was fine, but the latter was worrying. Well, more worrying. It was already a bit distressing having it in my head, as you can imagine. Plus, the growing patch of ink-black skin on my stomach. Oh yeah, and the weight loss.

“Colm? Hello?”

There was so much fucked up shit in my life. Magic cancer, kidnapped brother, hiding from the magi-cops (or perhaps magic-feds? What was their hierarchy?) while also having to rely on them. I was feeling overwhelmed. A part of me I hadn’t thought of in a while rose to the surface, floating a name to the front of my mind. A few hours work and I could have more power if I was willing to pay the price.

I crushed the thought with a grimace.

“Colm!”

I turned my head with a start, realizing Alice and Ida had been calling my name for a good bit. “Sorry,” I said. “I was in my own head. What’d I miss?”

Alice studied me with a slightly worried expression before she began speaking. “Albright wants us to call him as soon as Bogo thinks we’re getting close. Will he bark or something?”

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“Or something,” I said. “He gets progressively more excited as soon as he senses the end of the trail.” I paused and rubbed his ears. “We’ll need to stop at a McDonald’s for his food.”

The next few hours passed in relative silence, broken by Ida giving me an unprompted shoulder massage that felt so good I nearly drifted into a semi. When she was done I grabbed her hand and planted a kiss on her knuckles. “When this is over I am paying you back for that, in spades.”

“You’d better,” she said, her voice full of promise.

Aside from that moment of peace, the rest of the ride was a bit tense as Albright would call every fifteen minutes for an update, his chipper demeanor seeming to increase every time.

Just past the Arizona/New Mexico border, Bogo suddenly shifted in my lap and stood up on all fours, nearly blinding me. I shoved his butt down so I could see the road while the not-dog pressed his nose harder into the crack in the window. I rolled it down all the way for him and he stuck his head outside, his mouth hanging open in a happy dog grin.

“How close, Bogo? Twenty miles?”

He didn’t reply.

“Fifteen?”

“Ten?”

“Boof!” Bogo said, his real mouth showing a bit in his excitement.

“Call Albright,” I said. “Tell him we’re closing in.”

Bogo gave me prompts, mostly growling when I made a wrong turn. Because he refused to move his head out of the driver’s side window, he couldn’t point very well and his directions involved me doing a lot of U-turns. He was practically buzzing when I pulled into a McDonald’s and got his reward.

We were in a small town that was called Lordsburg and it was the kind of town that existed because of the highway. It had one school, one or two churches, and a bunch of little motels for people doing cross-country drives. Bogo had me head north and out of town a few miles before making me stop on a stretch of driveway that went to what looked like a big, Amazon-style warehouse. He jumped out the window and pointed at the warehouse like a bird-dog.

The place was surrounded by a high chain-link fence and had a security booth. I could see movement within but with my poor distance vision couldn’t tell who or what was inside the booth.

“This is it,” I said to Albright, who had been on speaker since we left the highway.

“You sure?” He asked.

“Bogo is,” I said, glancing at the still-pointing not-dog.

“Good enough for me,” he said. “Keep your heads down. The first team should arrive in a few minutes.”

“Roger,” I said.

Alice hung up her phone as we all climbed out of the car and stretched our backs and legs. Tony had suffered in silence for the most part and was groaning happily to be out of the cramped back seat.

I turned to Bogo. “You ready to eat?” I asked.

Bogo stopped pointing and spun in a circle, his tail wagging. I tossed him the food, bag and all. Bogo jumped in the air and opened his mouth—his real one, the one that split him down the middle with all the horrific teeth. He snapped his jaws on the bag and chewed with a weird rhythmic motion that carried through his entire body. He barked happily, his real mouth opening and closing with a whoosh of air.

“Sorry this took so long, buddy,” I said and gave him a pat on the head. “Tell your dad I said you were a very good boy.”

Bogo barked happily and ran away. Between one instant and the next, he was gone.

“That was so fucking weird,” Alice said.

I turned and opened my mouth to reply, but my danger sense went off stronger than it ever had before—in two seconds I’d cease to exist. An explosion. A panicked scanning of the horizon revealed a flash in the distance, coming from the direction of the security booth. “Down!” I shouted instead of whatever else I was about to say, raising my magic and shoving all of it at the approaching flash. There was an explosion and something that felt like a hammer hitting my mind.

I vaguely understood I was flying through the air. The knowledge did me no good as my flight came to an abrupt end as I landed on my right shoulder and head, nearly breaking my neck. My knees slammed into the ground next and I think I broke a toe. Adrenaline kept me from blacking out. I rolled onto my left side and angled my head back to see what the fuck was going on.

Alice was on the ground several yards to my left. She was bleeding from a gash on her head and her arms had several lacerations—I couldn’t tell if she was conscious. Tony was to my right, further away than Alice, sitting up and holding his hands to a bleeding abdomen. I couldn’t see Ida anywhere.

The Prius was on its side. Whatever had exploded had been enough to shatter all the windows and knock it back so it tipped over the wheels on the left side. My eyes had trouble focusing, but I could see movement past the Prius… toward the Security booth. I got the distinct impression of someone lifting a heavy weapon to their shoulder.

I tried to gather my magic but my head was spinning. I assumed they were aiming another thing that had nearly killed us. I watched as the blurry figure settled its stance, all the while trying to think of something I could do.

Suddenly another figure exited the security booth and stopped the first figure. I hope he was saying something along the lines of “You’re fired, Dave. You just blew up a random car next to the highway. I don’t care that the driver was incredibly hot and you wish you were him.”

I think I hit my head pretty hard. Thinking was difficult. Trying to gather my magic simply wasn’t happening so I let it fall away. I felt my grip on consciousness becoming looser. Man, I didn’t want to pass out again. That’s got to be bad for my brain.

In the distance, past the security booth, I saw movement. The steady grind of tires coming from the same direction told me it was a vehicle. Fuck. If I were a betting man, I’d say that was a cleanup crew.

I turned to look at Alice. Her bleeding was slowing and the lacerations I could see on her were also improving. She must be using a healing spell. Even with that, she was in no shape to defend herself. I turned and found Tony in a similar situation, eyes closed and focused on his midsection.

I looked around as much as I could, every movement sending waves of agony through my neck and head.

Where was Ida?